Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Facebook and Twitter not removing WikiLeaks, yet

By

facebook-wikileaks-page
Image used with permission by copyright holder

WikiLeaks is all over the news lately. After releasing 250,000 U.S. State Dept. cables (emails), the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, has come under assault. Though it has not been formally accused of any crime, members of the U.S. Gov’t are calling for companies to stop supporting the rogue organization. In the last week, WikiLeaks has suffered rounds of Ddos hack attacks, Amazon stopped hosting its files, EveryDNS canceled its routing service, PayPal disabled its account, Visa suspended payments to it, Mastercard is suspending payments, Assange’s Swiss bank has frozen his account, and the founder was arrested on rape charges.

Recommended Videos

With so many companies buckling to Gov’t pressure, Forbes asked Facebook if it was planning to disable WikiLeaks’ Facebook account. Spokesperson Andrew Noyes said no.

“We haven’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content,” said Noyes. “If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate. The mere existence of a Wikileaks fan page on Facebook doesn’t violate any law and we would not take it down just like we don’t take down other pages about controversial topics. We’re continuing to monitor the situation.”

Yesterday, Twitter was also pressured after reporters wondered by #wikileaks and #cablegate trending topics had seemingly disappeared from the site’s main page. Spokesperson Matt Graves also claims that Twitter is not disabling or censoring anything.

“Twitter is not censoring #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related terms from the Trends list of trending topics,” said Graves. “There’s a number of factors that may come into play when seemingly popular terms don’t make the Trends list. Sometimes topics that are popular don’t break into the Trends list because the current velocity of conversation (volume of Tweets at a given moment) isn’t greater than in previous hours and days. Sometimes topics that are genuinely popular simply aren’t widespread enough to make the list of top Trends. And, on occasion, topics just aren’t as popular as people believe.”

So, despite the corporate world completely caving in to Gov’t pressure, WikiLeaks still has social networks on its side…at least for now.

Topics
Jeffrey Van Camp
Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
ChatGPT now interprets photos better than an art critic and an investigator combined
OpenAI press image

ChatGPT's recent image generation capabilities have challenged our previous understing of AI-generated media. The recently announced GPT-4o model demonstrates noteworthy abilities of interpreting images with high accuracy and recreating them with viral effects, such as that inspired by Studio Ghibli. It even masters text in AI-generated images, which has previously been difficult for AI. And now, it is launching two new models capable of dissecting images for cues to gather far more information that might even fail a human glance.

OpenAI announced two new models earlier this week that take ChatGPT's thinking abilities up a notch. Its new o3 model, which OpenAI calls its "most powerful reasoning model" improves on the existing interpretation and perception abilities, getting better at "coding, math, science, visual perception, and more," the organization claims. Meanwhile, the o4-mini is a smaller and faster model for "cost-efficient reasoning" in the same avenues. The news follows OpenAI's recent launch of the GPT-4.1 class of models, which brings faster processing and deeper context.

Read more
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision AI is now free to use, but only for these 9 sites
Copilot Vision graphic.

After months of teasers, previews, and select rollouts, Microsoft's Copilot Vision is now available to try for all Edge users in the U.S. The flashy new AI tool is designed to watch your screen as you browse so you can ask it various questions about what you're doing and get useful context-appropriate responses. The main catch, however, is that it currently only works with nine websites.

For the most part, these nine websites seem like pretty random choices, too. We have Amazon, which makes sense, but also Geoguessr? I'm pretty sure the point of that site is to try and guess where you are on the map without any help. Anyway, the full site list is as follows:

Read more
Fun things to ask ChatGPT now that it remembers everything
ChatGPT on a laptop

If you hadn't heard, ChatGPT's memory just got a whole lot better. Rolled out across the world to Plus and Pro users over the past few days, ChatGPT's various models can now reference almost any past conversation you had. It doesn't remember everything word for word, but can pull significant details, themes, and important points of reference from just about anything you've ever said to it.

It feels a little creepy at times, but ChatGPT can now be used for much more personalized tasks. OpenAI pitches this as a way to improve its scheduling feature to use it as a personal assistant, or to help you continue longer chats over extended periods of time. But it's also quite fun to see what ChatGPT can tell you by trawling throughh all your chatlogs. It's often surprising some of the answers it spits out in response.

Read more